Casapueblo
Interesting facts
- Páez Vilaró's first shelter on the site, a hut of planks gathered from the beach, was named La Pionera, meaning The Pioneer.
- When Páez Vilaró bought the seafront land at Punta Ballena in 1958, the headland was still largely deserted.
- Although he was living there by 1968, the artist kept adding to the building, sometimes creating a room especially for a particular guest.
- The museum's exhibition rooms are named after Pablo Picasso, a friend from the artist's Paris years, the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén and the critics Rafael Squirru and José Gómez-Sicre.
- Its spaces also include a Terrace of the Mermaid, a Hippocampus Lookout and a café called the Tavern of the Green Ray.
- Guests received here over the years included the Brazilian poet and musician Vinícius de Moraes and the Chilean writer Isabel Allende.
- Páez Vilaró took a leading part in the search for survivors of the 1972 Andes crash and was reunited with his son after the December rescue.
- In 1989 he rebuilt an abandoned house in Tigre, near Buenos Aires, in the manner of Casapueblo and called it Bengala.
- Páez Vilaró died at Casapueblo on 24 February 2014, aged 90, having kept working almost to his last day.
- In 2017 the scenic road across Punta Ballena was officially named after Carlos Páez Vilaró.
Why it is worth it
Casapueblo spills down a headland above the Atlantic like something grown rather than built: a cascade of whitewashed terraces, domes and rounded balconies thirteen storeys deep, without a single straight line inside. It was the life's work of the Uruguayan painter, potter and muralist Carlos Páez Vilaró, who began it in 1958 at Punta Ballena, west of Punta del Este, around a small hut of planks gathered on the shore that served as his first studio. He went on adding to it for 36 years, with no plans at all, treating it as what he called a sculpture one can live in.
Visitors often compare the white mass to the cliff villages of Santorini, but Páez Vilaró had a local model in mind: the mud nest of the rufous hornero, the ovenbird found across Uruguay. The walls are cement and stucco, shaped by hand and left white, and the building grew year by year in directions nobody could have predicted. When the municipality eventually asked for drawings, the artist recalled, an architect friend needed a month just to work out how to record what was there.
The main dome holds the museum and workshop, with rooms devoted to Páez Vilaró's painting, ceramics and sculpture, and terraces that look straight out over the water toward the setting sun. Since 1994 the house has marked each sunset with a small ceremony: a few minutes before the sun touches the sea, a recording of the artist reads a poem of farewell to it. The building also keeps a tribute to his son Carlos Miguel Páez, one of the sixteen survivors of the 1972 Andes crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571. Páez Vilaró lived and worked here until the end of his life; much of the complex is now a hotel.
Punta del Este, a few kilometres east, is Uruguay's best-known seaside resort, set on a narrow peninsula where the Río de la Plata meets the open ocean.
Getting there
Casapueblo stands on the Punta Ballena headland in Maldonado Department, about 13 km west of Punta del Este; the city of Maldonado is roughly 9 km away. The nearest airport is Capitán Corbeta Carlos A. Curbelo International Airport at Laguna del Sauce (PDP), about 7.5 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Casapueblo is a building constructed by the Uruguayan artist Carlos Páez Vilaró. It is located in Punta Ballena, 13 kilometres (8 mi) from Punta del Este, Uruguay. Initially, it was the artist's summer home and workshop, and includes a museum, an art gallery, a cafeteria and a hotel in its facilities. It was the permanent residence of its creator, who worked and spent his last days there.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
-34.90887, -55.04491per Wikidata